In a Kitchen Far, Far Away (Episode I)

So here we are, in month 97 or so of the pandemic quarantining.

I’ve been doing the bulk of the cooking while we’re (more or less) stuck here, as my wife is working from home and I’m unemployed, so I really have nothing better to do with my time. At some point, though, I fell into a rut in which I just didn’t have the motivation to make anything. We were trying new recipes and making an effort to keep things fresh, but I just felt like I had made every possible food item one person could possibly make.

In this galaxy, anyway…

Enter Disney and Star Wars, and their cookbook featuring recipes inspired by Galaxy’s Edge.

Someone at Disney thought “hey, we haven’t made a few bucks off of that guy recently” and released this to correct that oversight.

Since getting this cookbook, we’ve tried a variety of the recipes found within, and in this post I’m going to share these culinary adventures. It should be noted, before we get going, that these recipes are not necessarily the exact food items found in Galaxy’s Edge at the theme parks. Some things in the cookbook don’t appear in the land at all (as far as I’ve seen) and others are modified from their actual Black Spire Outpost versions. So it’s more accurate to say that these are “inspired by” Black Spire Outpost than direct copies of what you could get there.

Also, as an aside: the actual text in the book is pretty great. It’s written from the viewpoint of Cookie, the chef of the Docking Bay 7 restaurant on Batuu, and it’s part cookbook and part travelogue as he describes the different planets he found these recipes on. So that’s fun.

Without further ado, let’s launch this thing and take a culinary journey across the galaxy!

Mimbanese Mudslide

The first thing we tried was the Mimbanese Mudslide, which is a chocolate pudding with hints of Earl Grey tea and cinnamon.

Per the recipe’s instructions, our pudding was topped with whipped cream and crumbled chocolate cookies.

The recipe itself is pretty straightforward, working much like making any chocolate pudding. The big difference here is that you steep an Earl Grey teabag in the hot milk before mixing that in with the rest of the ingredients.

The recipe asks for dark cocoa powder, but all we had on hand was regular stuff, so that’s what we used. Otherwise we followed the recipe exactly, and overall it turned out pretty well. It was very tasty, and had a hint of cinnamon. If anything, we found that the Earl Grey taste was lost amid the other flavors, but it was still a tasty chocolate pudding.

For our second attempt, we wanted to try and get more Earl Grey, so we used two teabags to try and up that flavor. We also got dark cocoa powder as the recipe asks for. This batch ended up being way better than the first. This dark chocolate version was richer than the batch using the regular cocoa, and upping the tea really helped bring out the Earl Grey taste. It wasn’t overpowering, but last time we couldn’t taste it at all so this was a good happy medium.

Note: for the cookie topping we used some thin, crispy chocolate cookies. However, I happened to have some Sakura blossom Oreos on hand from a recent trip to a nearby Asian supermarket. I crushed these up over a serving of the pudding, and the sweet flowery flavor actually worked really well with it. I don’t think that’s something that’s easy to come by, but it’s a note to keep in mind.

Nectrose Crystals

Nectrose crystals are a topping for some desserts and drinks in the cookbook. It’s basically sugar, honey, and a few other things mixed together. It also includes citric acid and baking soda, and during cooking those create a crazy foaming reaction. After this sweet concoction is cooked for a bit, it’s spread out to cool and dry until it can be shattered into tiny bits.

The only variation from the recipe we made was that we used Kosher salt instead of the rock salt that it asked for. We went online and found a conversion between the two, but we didn’t have any rock salt so we went with what we had. I don’t know if it made any difference in the end result.

Our first attempt was interesting, though not perfect. Due to humidity (and possibly spreading it too thick in the cooling/drying phase) it never really got to the point that it would shatter as the recipe stated. The edges sorta did, but most of it was more of a chewy toffee-like thing than a crunchy topping. That being said, it was still tasty and super sweet. It also had a weird, almost fizzy quality as it melted in your mouth.

Late in the cooking process, citric acid and baking soda is added into the mix. This causes an almost immediate chemical reaction and the stuff expands and fizzes like crazy. I’d highly recommend using a pot big enough to take that into account, or you might end up with it all over your stove.

For take two, it was far less humid. So the sugary stuff dried a lot faster once it was spread out to cool, and it cracked when bent as it’s meant to. We didn’t use orange extract this time, though, instead opting for vanilla extract and caramel flavoring. It… didn’t work. The citric acid in the recipe overpowered everything, and I think we overcooked it as it had a bit of a burnt sugar taste. So one step forward, one step back.

As they say, the third time’s the charm (of course, they also say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result). This time we didn’t have humidity to deal with, we went back to the orange extract flavoring, and everything pretty much worked out the way we wanted. It shattered when dried, it tasted better than acidic burnt sugar, and other than being a bit sticky on the surface (which may just be the way it is) it was a decent topping for our Mimbanese Mudslide pudding.

My only complaint about this batch: since I used purple food coloring, I kept expecting it to taste like grape instead of orange when I bit into it. Unless maybe space grapes in the Star Wars universe taste like space oranges? Yeah, that must be it…

Side note: this stuff solidifies and becomes a substance that will adhere to anything: the pot, the spoon, the countertop. Hot water will take care of it, but you probably don’t want to wait too long before at least rinsing off the cookware lest it all get glued together.

Ronto Wraps

It should be pointed out that these are very different from the Ronto Wraps that are served at Galaxy’s Edge. Whether they wanted to keep that one as a parks exclusive, or they felt that this was easier for home cooks, I can’t say for sure. Either way, though, while this was good it was not the same dish that you’ll find in Black Spire Outpost. There, it’s a spicy sausage wrapped in pork with a zesty slaw and a peppercorn sauce in a flatbread. The home version is more of a ground meat wrap with a sweet tomato-based sauce and a dollop of guacamole on top.

While just purchasing flatbread is certainly an option (and I do appreciate a good path of least resistance), the cookbook does have a recipe to make it fresh. So, that’s what we did.

The dough for the Ronto Wrap flatbread has some herbs and seasonings in it to give it some flavor. It also, when cooked, made our entire apartment smell like fresh bread. Which was a very good smell to have in your apartment.

I really liked the end result here, and found this homemade recipe better than a store bought flatbread. Our first couple tries were a little small and thin (as we got better at it, they got bigger and fluffier).

We diverted from the recipe a bit for the assembly of the meat. In the book, they have you remove the casings from the chorizo sausage and mix it all in with ground pork. Since we wanted to sort of keep the basic concept of an actual Galaxy’s Edge Ronto Wrap, though, we kept the sausages intact. Also, just for reference, we didn’t use any actual pork in our version. As my wife keeps kosher, and eating the meat of pigs is a no-no on that front, we used kosher beef sausage and ground turkey instead.

The end result is sort of a guacamole-topped sloppy joe, but with sausage and wrapped in a flatbread.

As stated before, these are quite different than the version sold on the distant planet of Batuu. It’s meaty and tomato-ey, sweet and a bit spicy (depending on what sort of sausage you use).

Personally, I prefer the authentic Galaxy’s Edge version. I like the bright crispness of the slaw in contrast to the meat, and I really like the peppercorn sauce. My wife, who has never tried one of the “real” ones (again, kosher) thinks that she’d prefer this home version if given the choice. She’s not that into spicy things, and doesn’t care for pepper, so the sweeter version was more up her alley. I don’t think this was bad by any means, I just don’t consider it a true Ronto Wrap. I’d definitely make it again, though I may not make the fresh flatbread every time. It was tasty and pretty easy, so I could also see making up some flatbread with his recipe and using it for other types of wraps.

Pikobi Eggs

Fun fact about me: I love deviled eggs. If Jabba the Hutt were like “hey, I need you to go down into the Rancor pit. There are deviled eggs down there, but you’ll also probably get eaten”, I’d likely go for it even knowing that it would lead to my certain doom.

So when I saw that there was a Star Wars version of deviled eggs in this cookbook, it was one of the first things I had to try.

The recipe has two slightly different options for the yolk mixture. One uses mayonnaise, whereas the other calls for making an “Emulsauce” that’s found earlier in the book. To do it right, we opted for the latter. The Emulsauce is a mix of egg yolks, oil, rice vinegar, and a couple other things. The most interesting ingredient, and the one that really gives it its unique flavor, is white miso.

We ended up having to make a second batch of the Emulsauce, though. In the recipe it calls for olive oil, and we found that it gave the sauce a weird taste (and we used a decent oil, too). When we tried it again we used a neutral vegetable oil, and the sauce came out much better. Maybe the recipe was designed that way intentionally to give it that unusual flavor (to make it more Star Wars-y), but we found it almost inedible and were much happier with the second batch.

There’s also a bit of white miso in the egg mixture, as well as toasted sesame oil. This gives them a different flavor than what you’d normally associate with a deviled egg, which is generally more of a creamy mayo/mustard concoction. We did lower the amount of miso that the egg mixture calls for — having some in both the Emulsauce and the yolks could make for a rather salty egg, and even with the lower amount it still had a pretty strong miso flavor.

Sesame seeds, and a bit of hot sauce, finish off these deviled pikobi eggs. The recipe calls for black sesame seeds, which would have made them look cooler, but all I had on hand were white ones.

I really liked these. They were different than what I’d consider a “standard” deviled egg, but the combination of the miso and sesame gave them a unique flavor that I thought worked well. I’m glad that we opted to lower the miso content, though, as I think if we had gone for the full amount it would have been too much for me.

Bespin Cloud Drops

The Emulsauce recipe used egg yolks, which left us with some egg whites left over that we didn’t want to go to waste. So, we opted to make some Bespin Cloud Drops.

Bespin Cloud Drops are pretty much just meringue cookies. The difference is mostly in the color, as the recipe calls for food coloring to be swirled in to resemble the clouds of Bespin, and the flavor. In the recipe from the book, it asks for desert pear syrup to be added in.

It turns out that desert pear syrup isn’t something that you can just pick up at any store, so we don’t have any on hand. We did have lemon extract syrup, however, so we used that instead. Which means we still got a fruity flavor mixed in, just not the one that the cookbook calls for.

The recipe calls for just one color, but the clouds of Bespin are many different hues so we opted for a more colorful batch of Cloud Drops.

If you’ve ever had a meringue before, you know what to expect here. They’re slightly crispy, slightly gooey, and they taste a bit like a marshmallow (only, in this case, with lemon mixed in). We had a bit of an issue with humidity again, and as a result they took a while to really firm up, but once they did they were pretty much like the meringue cookies I’ve made in the past. This isn’t a bad thing, of course, since meringues are delicious.

Sooner or later I do need to track down some desert pear syrup, though. It sounds tasty.

Mustafarian Lava Buns

Here’s another recipe that is very different from its Galaxy’s Edge counterpart. At the parks they serve a Mustafarian Lava Roll, which is a cinnamon roll type thing with berry and chocolate flavors and a chocolate cookie crumble on top. The cookbook recipe is for a Lava Bun, which is basically a dinner roll.

The Mustafarian Lava Bun is made up of two parts: the bun and the topping.

Many of the recipes in the book use food coloring to make the dish look more otherworldly. In this case, the buns are red.

The topping is black, so when combined with the red buns it’s meant to evoke the lava planet of Mustafar.

The bun itself is a yeasted ball of bread with slightly sweet/slightly crunchy topping on top that’s crackled to give it a unique look and texture. I believe what they’re basically going for is a tiger bread (thanks, Great British Baking Show) but with a Mustafarian color scheme.

In the recipe, it asks you to use a pastry brush to spread the black topping over the red bun before baking. However, we found that the topping was way too thick to spread effectively. We followed the recipe exactly, but maybe we should have added some water or something to make it easier to spread. As it was, we used a spoon and our fingers to get the topping onto the buns.

The photo in the cookbook shows red buns with a black glaze beautifully spread over them. What we got was… not that. However, they do definitely evoke the rock and lava of Mustafar!

Whether or not you like these depends a lot on how you feel about dinner rolls. They taste like a yeasty bun, with a bit of a sweet rice flavor from the topping, so if you’re into that you’ll probably like them. I’m more into bread than my wife is, so I liked them more than she did. I’ll say, too, that slicing them open, warming them up, and spreading some butter on them improves them quite a bit. Then again, that can improve pretty much anything.

I could see these being a great side to serve with a Star Wars and/or Halloween themed meal. I may try them again, if only because I want to try and get the topping right. I can’t let the buns win, you see…

Huttese Slime Pods

This was, at least so far, our favorite of the Star Wars recipes we’ve made from the Galaxy’s Edge cookbook.

Huttese Slime Pods are gnocchi in a thick green sauce. The sauce is made up of avocado, pistachios, spinach, parmesan cheese, and a few other ingredients that are all tossed into a food processor until… slimy.

We had bought a fresh avocado for this, but then accidentally looked at it wrong and it started to go bad (if you’ve cooked with avocadoes, you know how it is). Unfortunately, we didn’t notice this until we cut it open to put it into the sauce. Fortunately, we had some single-serving avocado cups (Wholly Guacamole, I believe) in the freezer that we could quickly defrost and toss in. We had to guess a bit as to the right amount that would equal one whole avocado, and we used two of the cups. It seemed fine, as the avocado wasn’t overpowering or lost amid the other flavors. Go us!

The taste of this dish is a bit hard to describe. All of the individual flavors come through, but also meld together into something altogether unique. The pistachios and avocado give it a brightness, while the cream and parmesan offer depth and a bit of tang. It’s sweet, savory, nutty, cheesy, and really unlike anything I’ve ever eaten. Then, of course, there’s the gnocchi with its soft texture and mild taste that really just serves as a vehicle for the sauce. There are also supposed to be cannellini beans in there along with the gnocchi, but neither of us care for those so we left them out.

Everything else we’ve made so far hasn’t really looked “alien”. Then there’s this bright green madness.

If anything we’ve made so far could be described as some sort of alien concoction, this would be it. It was also delicious, and surprisingly easy to make. It’s really just cooking the gnocchi, blending the sauce ingredients, mixing it all together, and putting it into your mouth (or, if you’re Ithorian, your mouths).

We’re absolutely making this one again. Maybe once the pandemic is over we’ll even invite some Hutt friends over to share. (wait… do we HAVE Hutt friends?–my wife/editor) We’re also somewhat curious about trying the sauce on pasta rather than gnocchi, so that might happen at some point. It might not. Gnocchi is pretty tasty.

There are a lot more recipes in the cookbook, and we intend to continue on this culinary adventure. In fact, while writing this post we’ve already tried making several more of the Galaxy’s Edge inspired foods. So, expect a second episode soon… ish.

Then, of course, I’ll have to write a third one. I mean, Star Wars is all about trilogies!